Halladay’s Goal: “Finish my career with the Phillies and win a World Series here”

Phillies “Ace of Aces” Roy Halladay had his second opinion today on his strained right lat muscle and nothing new came from it.

Halladay will rest it for three weeks before he is able to begin throwing. If all goes according to plan, Halladay will be back in about eight weeks.

The injury also affects Halladay’s contract situation with the Phillies for the future. Since Halladay is injured, he won’t reach the innings requirement for his vesting option in 2014.

Halladay isn’t concerned with not meeting that requirement though because it’s a year and a half away. In fact, all Halladay wants for the rest of his career is to continue wearing the red pinstripes.

“Ultimately, my goal is to finish my career with the Phillies and win a World Series here,” Halladay said. “Some of those things are not fully in my control, but my intent is to play here and finish my career here and be here as long as I can. I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next year and a half, but I know from my side I’m going to make an effort to be here as long as I can and finish here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

Halladay also went into depth about his pitch count when he returns. In years past, Halladay could throw at least 120 pitches easily without the Phillies worrying about fatigue.

Now, it’s a different scenarion. Halladay chimes in on that:

“As far as a lot of pitches and stuff, I’ve always felt like the games that I pitch deeper in, the complete games and stuff, I feel like I’m more efficient in those games. Usually when I hit 125 or 130, I’m kind of scuffling through 7 or 8 innings. I still feel like I’m going to be able to do that.

“And I feel like, it’s going to be important to monitor the throwing. And that was kind of the tough part for me through this process. I felt like I had adjustments that needed to be made, but at the same time we went through a stretch of 7 or 8 starts on five days rest.

“I was delicate of how much I could throw in between and work on what I needed to do and how much I needed to rest, but I think that’s going to be important going forward, monitoring those in between days with the training staff and stuff. It’s been very good the first two years here. I don’t see any difference in that.”

Todd Zolecki will have more later, which I’ll link to here at the bottom. For now, those were the only two quotes he posted on his blog, The Zo Zone.